


Minor Cause

by Rhe



Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: Depression, F/F, Gen, Introspection, Ladystuck 2014, Sadstuck, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-13
Updated: 2015-01-13
Packaged: 2018-03-07 09:27:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3169805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhe/pseuds/Rhe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Based on the Ladystuck prompt "So Terezi is a Seer. Based on the previous Seer players we've seen, they become aware of any past lives they lived. Meaning Terezi might have visions of her Beforan past. How would she handle this, and would she seek Rose's advice? Could she be of any help if at all?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Minor Cause

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PaintedYertle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaintedYertle/gifts).



> This isn't as polished or perhaps even as coherent as I'd like it to be, but I hope it's enjoyable and meets the spirit of the prompt, PaintedYertle!

You’re used to dreaming of unfortunate things.

Being a Seer, it comes with the territory, and it doesn’t even always technically count as “dreaming”. There have been plenty of times you stood back and just let the visions come, fragmented and inconclusive as they might be. They’re clearer when you have a moment to sit and really focus, but even that isn’t as good as what comes to you in dreams.

The dreams don’t come all the time, and recently they’ve been coming even less than they used to. You don’t know if this has to do with the apparently-doomed nature of your game session (you’re working with the kids, it’s true, but without them you all would have been left drifting through space until Lord English caught up with you) or because you’ve been passing through a lot of dream bubbles lately. Either way, the quantity and quality of your dream-visions have been astoundingly low lately and you don’t know why. It’s distressing but you just can’t muster up the energy to try and fix it, and so you’ve been coasting along under the assumption that your time as an effective Seer is over.

That is, until you met your dancestor.

She was so cool, and so well liked, and although you managed to run off and hide from her (she was far more amazing than you could ever imagine being, and it stung) she still told you a little about how back on Beforus she had wanted to help trolls like you used to.

This seemed incorrect to you, but you didn't bother telling her this. How could someone like you ever be an example for helping trollkind? You delighted in dealing out your own brand of justice, and you're now more aware than ever that this "justice" wasn't yours to deal. You didn't want to hear anymore and so you excused yourself and hid away, pushed the treacherous thoughts of should, would, and could-haves down, and hoped that would be the end of it.

That was, of course, when the dreams decided to return.

You dreamed of you that wasn't you in a world that wasn't your world, and you were doing things you never would have imagined possible for someone with your past.

You guess the past that this you has is different from the past you had.

When the dream ends you wake sweating and shaken, surrounded by chalk and Faygo bottles, and you automatically reach up to make sure your dragon hood is pulled down over your eyes. The light is still there but this is better than nothing, and you sniff the air to get a proper look at the block. Everything seems in order and no one else has been in here, and so you continue sitting there for a while longer. There's no place to be on this stupid hunk of rock anyway.

You stay in your pile of blankets and muse over your dream for longer than technically necessary before finally willing yourself to get up and start moving. You don't know what time it is but time is irrelevant here; if the person you want to talk to is awake then she's awake, and if she's not you'll just have to wait until she is.

After changing into your (sort of, you haven't been keeping up with many chore-type activities) clean clothes you make a quick trip to the ablution block to tidy up a little. Your hair is in dire need of a wash but you don't want to do that right now, and you figure your hood will cover anything too bad anyway. A shower can happen once you've cleared your mind a little. You reluctantly pull down your hood and splash some water on your face, then scrub it off with a towel, keeping your eyes shut tight the entire time. It's a relief when you finally get to pull the hood back up over your eyes, and with that you set off to find Rose, grabbing your cane along the way.

Rose isn't usually hard to find - if she's not in the computer lab or the meal prep block she's in either hers or Kanaya's private blocks. You hop on a transportalizer and make your way to the computer lab first, and you're glad when Dave isn't there but Kanaya is.

"Hey Kanaya. Do you happen to know where Rose is?"

She looks up from the shirt she's mending - it smells like one of Rose's - and nods.

"I believe she went to obtain some food, as it is approximately lunch time," she says.

You give her a thumbs up and hop back on the transportailizer, then make your way down familiar halls until you hear the sounds of someone cooking something from within the meal-preparation block. From the sounds you're hearing your best guess is some kind of human "pasta", since that dish requires multiple pots and pans to make. You guess that Rose isn't drinking yet today, or if she is she hasn't had much. Drunk cooking tends to be much louder than this.

As you step into the warm and red-smelling block (it's definitely pasta, with that red sauce that smells warm and just a little sharp) Rose greets you.

"Good afternoon, Terezi,” she says.

You think she’s having a good day today, based on her cooking and not smelling like human alcohol (which smells like a dry mixture of sour and bitter and even tasting the air near it you can feel your tongue go numb). She’s stirring something in one of her pots, you can hear the small scraping noises of her plastic spoon against the metal, and you sit at the table in the middle of the room before answering.

“Do you mind if I talk to you about something? Something I’d rather not get spread around the meteor like the latest piece of juicy gossip to be devoured?” You keep your tone light, but you mean what you say. If Dave or Karkat or anyone else gets on your ass about this you’re going to flip your shit.

Rose sets down the cooking spoon she was using and turns to face you, and when she speaks her voice sounds like a smile.

“I assure you, I am the very essence of discretion when so inclined. I won’t speak of this to anyone, unless you give me express permission to do so.”

You nod. “Thank you. I mean it.”

“What are friends for?” She turns back to the stove and continues cooking, and you sit in silence and think for a few moments.

“I think,” you say slowly, “that I’ve been dreaming of a life I lived on Beforus.”

Rose _Hmmms_ softly, but otherwise stays silent to let you continue.

“It’s just bizarre. I’ve been basically devoid of any kind of seer-ish visions or dreams, and now all of a sudden I get a full-on frontal assault view of a past life some alternate me lived. It’s strange and uncomfortable and I did not appreciate it!”

You stop yourself there, biting down lightly on your tongue before you can spill any more feelings than you have to. You want to, _need_ to be in control of situations, especially any involving you and your emotions. Doing otherwise just lets people get the upper hand.

Rose pauses in her meal preparation and you’re pretty sure she’s looking at you. Damnit.

“I’m just saying I don’t like dreaming about a version of myself that isn’t me. Even when I’d have visions of doomed timelines when I saw me it was still _me._ This was something completely different, and it just…” you trail off and raise your hands in a questioning gesture, palms up and by your shoulders.

“It just didn't seem natural, your role in the past world?” she asks.

You nod, and although there are more things you want to say it feels like everything wants to jumble out of you at once in a disgusting display of emotion, and so you stay quiet. Before the silence can go on for long enough to be truly uncomfortable, though, Rose speaks.

“I can understand this to a degree, I believe. The Earth that was created after the Scratch held a version of me that was not entirely someone I felt I knew. She was still me, of course, but her life and circumstances were far removed from my own. At the core, however, I could still identify the traits that made us the same person. Once I thought on it a little I realized it wasn’t so much that my nature had changed, but rather that the world around her was vastly different from the world I grew up in. Does this make sense?”

You make a noncommittal gesture to the side with your head, your hands now resting on the table in a deceptively calm manner. You force them to stay still and not betray how restless you feel inside.

“Let me put it another way. How a person is brought up and what their culture is like is going to be a huge influence on the rest of their life. You could take the same person and raise them in two opposite ways – and they would almost certainly be very different. Yet at the core, they would still be _them_. Just because you saw a version of you that may seem incompatible with your current self doesn't mean that either of you are wrong or defective or even not ideal. All it means is that you saw a part of you that wasn't prioritized in this life at this time.”

A wry smile manages to make itself known at the corners of your mouth.

“How would you know,” you say. “I never even told you what about the other me bothered me so much.”

“If you want to tell me, by all means, do,” she replies. “I just felt you needed some… reassurance, concerning this matter, before you felt up to talking about it.”

As much as you hate someone else knowing more about your intentions, needs, or wants than you yourself do, for some reason it doesn't sting much when Rose is the one knowing. Reserved and indecipherable as she may be at times, the Rose human isn't bad to have around. She’s kind in a way that throws you for a loop (probably all of you raised on Alternia, you think) but it’s not _bad_. It’s just different.

You could get used to different, as long as it feels this way.

“I think,” you say “that I would like to tell you about it some more, and maybe listen to what you have to say.”

Rose smiles, you can tell from all the way over here, and you can’t help but smile in return. You listen to her go back to cooking as you try and think of exactly how to talk about what’s bothering you, and finally just let out a sigh and cover your face with your hands.

“I guess I’ll just start with the dream I had, since that’s the root of this problem,” you grumble. “I was a legislacerator, but not quite a legislacerator- I was in charge of giving trolls fair trials and defending them instead of just prosecuting them.”

Your hear Rose tasting her sauce, then setting the spoon off to the side. “And this is significant because from what I understand, on Alternia there were only prosecuting legislacerators?”

“Yes. It was guilty until proven innocent, and no one was there to prove you innocent. So you can guess how that went,” you say.

Rose turns down the heat on her pans and takes the pasta over to a sink to drain. “I assume it was more of a show trial than anything else? And that anyone the empire was bothering to take to court was going to be punished?”

“More or less. The legislacerators would typically influence the severity of the punishment. Believe it or not it wasn’t always culling, that was just one of the more common ones,” you say, and you try not to think about all the trolls you culled on FLARP campaigns with Vriska in the name of justice when you were young and stupid. “But it was so different in the dream. I was actually helping other trolls, and there were wrigglers who looked up to me.”

“It’s not surprising to me that others would look up to such a person,” Rose muses as she pours out the pasta water. You think you can faintly feel the steam prickling at your face from here, though it could be your imagination.

You want to grind your teeth at the thought of being someone who should be looked up to. “It’s not that simple,” you mutter. “I've done too many unjust and horrible things with this life to deserve anything like being a “true agent of justice”, if such a thing even exists! I've aided and abetted in the culling of more trolls than even I can remember, and I sincerely doubt any of them really deserved their fate!” The words fly out of your mouth like daggers and you’re almost surprised to hear them yourself. But these thoughts have been festering in the back of your thinkpan for too long, and like it or not you’re going to work them out today. Damnit _damnit_.

You hate emotional messes. That goes doubly when the one who’s an emotional mess is you.

There’s the soft clank of a pot being set back on the stove, and then Rose is walking over to you and ever-so-gently putting one of her hands on one of yours, which is balled into a fist on the table. A modicum of the tension that’s been simmering in your veins bleeds out, and you sigh through your nose. This is awfully close to pale solicitation in your book, but you don’t feel like trying to make it stop. If anything, you want this kind of strings-free intimacy to continue, at least for a little longer.

“These cullings took place during your time with Vriska, did they not?” Rose says, and her tone isn’t judgmental in the slightest, only curious. You could kiss her for it. Instead you settle for nodding, and she continues. “While your actions cannot be excused, you were working with someone who convinced you it was for the greater good, while being raised in an environment that saw very little wrong with casual murder. It’s understandable how things turned out the way they did.”

“That’s not exactly comforting,” you say.

Rose squeezes your hand lightly before removing it and walking back over to the stove. “It is what it is. You are neither better nor worse than your Beforus counterpart. You are aware of your mistakes, and if you could rectify them, would you?”

You practically gape at her. “Of _course_ I would change things if I could!”

“There you have it,” she says, and you hear her opening a cupboard and the clink of plates and glasses as she takes them out. “You can’t change your past, so you have to change your future. You realize there are things that you have done wrong, and you wish to avoid those things happening again. You also have the unique opportunity to see other fragments of your other lives, which can serve both as a warning and as encouragement.”

There’s more plate clinking over by the stove, and before you can voice your skepticism she begins speaking again. “In the case of your Beforan self, it’s meant to be encouraging. You did a lot of good for that world, did you not?”

She has a point, and you nod only slightly grudgingly.

“So, you know you’ve done harm to your world in this life. But! You did great good for the world in another life. So then, being capable of both extremes -,” here she pauses, and sets a plate of food in front of you. “- what are you going to do with the rest of your life?”

You sit and ponder these (semi-cryptic, you don’t think Rose can resist being dramatic when the opportunity presents itself) statements, and then Rose gives you a fork and you hold the cool metal between your fingers and let it ground you. Rose sits across the table from you, and after another few heartbeats you stab your fork into the pasta, twirl it around, and take a bite. The food is hot and flavorful and _good_ , and as the warmth fills you it makes you feel almost yourself again.

You hear Rose eating as well, and though neither of your speak you feel the faintest sparks of new possibilities for yourself beginning to ignite. It won’t be today, or tomorrow, but at this moment you think that maybe you’ll be able to live up to yourself after all.


End file.
